When I first announced that I would be retiring at the end of the spring semester last year, Dr. Barry Gidcomb tried to dissuade me. A good friend and former student, he sent me an email in which he did a cost-benefit analysis of retirement. On the downside, he said that I would lose my office, the daily contact with colleagues, the income and the excuses for avoiding yard work and home repairs — a life of drudgery.

I enjoyed reading Mike Bennett's response to my columns on Ayn Rand and the value of life. He is, of course, correct about the difference between being on the Titanic in those desperate last minutes and being in a classroom where fifteen-year-olds decide who lives and who dies in the hypothetical scenario of a fallout shelter in a thermonuclear war.

The day after my column on Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand appeared in this paper, I was in a conversation with attorney Dalton Mounger about Rand's defense of selfishness. He made an interesting comment about the Titanic, which a hundred years ago sank with the loss of 1,500 lives. Men facing certain death watched stoically as women and children were placed in the lifeboats.

Last July at the 150th anniversary reenactment of the Battle of Bull Run, I was sitting around the campfire with a bunch of men who are now in the Cavalry Brigade of the First Federal Division. I have been riding with some of them for decades.

Observing the four-ring primary circus that was Florida last Tuesday, it is apparent that establishment Republicans are taking comfort in Gingrich's poor showing. He's been unrelenting of late in his attacks on establishment elites, ironic in that he's been a Washington insider for decades.

Last week my neighbor Roy Johnson gave me an article written by University of North Carolina history professor David Goldsmith, whose thesis is that the moral outrage over slavery by evangelicals in the North helped to push the country into war by discouraging compromise.

Recently, as I was driving through the Port Royal shopping area, I passed an African-American father with his two children in tow. Suddenly, from the backseat of my truck, my 2-year-old granddaughter excitedly cried out "It's Barack Obama! Look Paypaw! It's Barack Obama!"

When 14th century poet Dante Alighieri wrote his "Divine Comedy," he described the eighth concentric circle of Hell as the abode of corrupt politicians and hypocrites. In that allegorical work which literary historians call both medieval (about the afterlife) and modern (written in Tuscan rather than Latin), only the ninth circle was reserved for those sinners whose transgressions were more of an abomination in the eyes of God.

If "Schadenfreude" is a German word that means "taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others," I am deriving some serious Germanic joy from the spectacle of the Republican presidential candidates episodically shooting themselves in the foot, experiencing brain freezes, explaining away contradictory policy positions, and doing damage control for the sake of the spouse. It's obvious that things aren't going their way when Fox News inquisitors, of all people, ask embarrassing questions.